So, my picks from the beginning of the playoffs seem to have gone horribly awry. The Capitals were originally my Eastern Conference Champions, and they were supposed to lose to the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup Finals. On the bright side, my Philadelphia Flyers are on the verge of making hist...

My (least) favorite misconception is how people think about the Coriolis Force. It does not determine what direction the water in your sink or toilet spins when they empty. In order for something to be significantly influenced by Coriolis, it needs to be traveling a very large distance or last for a...

What about Gannon from the Legend of Zelda series? I never recall him him as having a real motive for what he does other than being a complete jerk. He's normally portrayed as the embodiment of evil, so I think he'd count as a true villain.

I went on a trip with a bunch of people to see some of the original rocks which marked the Mason-Dixon line. Afterwards I had to pilot the helicopter we took home. The helicopter was a wicker basket with a propeller on top, and I had trouble flying it because I couldn't find the collective controls ...

As a side note, for the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China shot 1000+ rockets into storm clouds to try to disperse them to keep it from raining on the opening ceremony. I am not familiar with any publication of any studies as to the effectiveness of this method, but, it didn't ra...

Isn't that kinda what America did at the beginning of the war? Sit there and let Russians die? I love it. In every war since World War II the US gets criticized for getting involved in a war on the other side of the world, but for World War II the US gets criticized for not getting involved in a wa...

A little bit more about that incident from wikipedia: At 9:40 a.m. on Saturday July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith, Jr., who was flying in a thick fog, accidentally crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building between the 79th and 80th fl...

I've never heard that - the invasion was scheduled to hit Kyushu in November '45, and they knew they wouldn't have additional bombs that early. Do you have a source? I've actually heard the same thing, I forget where, but my understanding was that, when U.S. Generals were told about the bombs, they...

Maybe hitting a satellite could divert it enough so that it'll hit the Earth sometime before the Sun expands and engulfs the inner solar system, and that may still be a gross overestimate. A communication satellite in geostationary orbit has about 47 Gigajoules (47 billion joules) of kinetic energy,...

Let's not forget Crosby's playoff debut last season, when they were dispatched in 5 games by the Sens. The Caps are a good young team with potential, but they need another year to gel and mature. In all honesty, I'd go so far to as to say that it's unfair to expect that kid, a playoff rookie, to ca...

The Flyers will probably be playing the Habs in the next round. Not a match up that I'm looking forward to. The winner of the Rangers-Devils series will be playing Pittsburgh, and whoever wins will probably be too beat up to anything to the Penguins.

I first read this as a sort of "My friends said it was ok, so I did it" but I don't think that's what you meant. Does it mean that because the U.K. and Russia did not condemn it, they were complicit? Because they certainly did benefit. I actually put that in there because, in my experienc...

The Flyers won game 2, and deservedly so. The Caps looked like the team they were the last two years (and the first two periods of game 1): sloppy passing, hitting, positioning, transitions, and game sense. You know you need to change your gameplan when the other team can predict what you are going...

Wow. Are there any figures for exactly how many Purple Hearts have been issued between the end of WWII and today? That's pretty damn powerful concrete evidence of the casualty expectations of a Japanese invasion. As of 2003, there were still 120,000 of those medals in stock, and about 500,000 were ...

The second on looks quite different. A wild guess could be... thermocline? Halocline? I don't think it could be that, the color change is so close to the shore that the water depth is probably so shallow that it doesn't reach the bottom of the mixed layer yet. And, for the second one, it couldn't b...

Make make it sounds that unlwafully eliminating an unlawful threat to your soldiers is a bad thing. It needs to be pointed out that Americans were unlawfully eliminatnig a lawful threat. So rounding up the population of a town, whether they're involved or not, including the children, putting them i...

I approve of the 20 penalty minutes in one period devoted to roughing and unsportsmanlike conduct calls. That's playoff hockey at its finest. To add on to Thoresen's woes. He may have to have surgery to remove the injured testicle. Edit to update: Thoresen was released from the hospital, and, though...

Interesting that you don't consider the massive numbers of horrifically painful civilian deaths from radiation poisoning in your analysis. If you did, it might come out a little differently. Is a slow painful death from starvation or disease, or horrifically burning to death in continued firebombin...

My apologies. No problem, that can be a confusing argument I make there. I personally think that it would have been best to use the bomb as an intimidation tactic. Drop it in an uninhabited harbor somewhere off the coast of Japan. To make it really personal, level mount Fuji. Give a really, really ...

Did you read my whole post, Garm? The Next paragraph: Now I know a county's people should not be held accountable for the crimes of the government, and that's not what I'm trying to do here , but when you look at those war crimes I listed (and I didn't even get all of Japan's war crimes there) and y...

It might be worth adding that, if you took your temperature in the morning, shortly after you woke up, it might still be low because I believe that your body temperature drops when you sleep. But if you're feeling feverish and it's reading a normal temperature, I'm gona go with the "You've got ...

Before people go and call this the worst war crime in the history of the world it need to be pointed out that The Japanese Empire was far from being innocent . In fact, there is an estimation that from about 1937 to 1945, the Japanese Empire was responsible for the deaths of around 3 Million civilia...

The Avs-Wild game looked like a good one. I watched the Calgary-San Jose one tonight which was pretty good. The Sharks almost pulled off a comeback, but Kiprusoff was just too good in that last minute.

I've been working on my playoff picks for the last few days, and so far all I've been able to do is poke holes in every team in the Eastern Conference without being able to make any picks, and I've only gotten to the conference semi-finals for the west. For the Eastern Conference: The Habs look to b...

segmentation fault wrote:i was watching a game where a body check occured next to the linesman, the linesman took a skate to the face, and the hit caused a brawl in which said linesman actually got up to try and stop despite his bleeding face.

Please find me that. I pride myself on knowing as much about the different ways global warming may or may not have been man-made, and have never come across the 'volcanoes under the North Pole' theory. Here's the best I could do on the Volcano: http://www.livescience.com/environment/080120-antarcti...

Hmm, really? A plane isn't a weather system though. Some sort of vertical force (perhaps the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s_effect ? ) might keep the plane so if it maintained the same airspeed going west as it did going east, it would experience a drop in altitude going wet and a ri...

If you completely discount the atmosphere, then it will take you the same amount of time to reach point B as it will point C. The Coriolis Force at the equator is zero, so it won't make a difference. If we want to talk about the atmosphere, things get a little more complicated. First of all, there i...